StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice Article

One Change at a Time

An organization's performance and the environment in which it operates change dynamically. Subsequently, most measures reflecting these performance variables are also dynamic; challenging analysts to interpret historical and predict future movement.


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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World explores the challenges and solutions to effectively managing multinational teams. During our discussion, Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World: 10 Strategies to Get Connected to Your Team Wherever They Are share their insights with us regarding:

  • overcoming communications challenges associated with geographic separation, time-zone differences, and cultural dissimilarities
  • leveraging cultural diversity to benefit the team and improve its outcomes
  • efficiently transitioning the team through its forming, storming, norming, and performing phases of development
  • providing feedback and performance reviews

Additional Information

Susan and Philip’s book, How to Manage in a Flat World, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Authors

Susan Bloch, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, has coached top teams in many of the FTSE100 and Fortune 500 companies across the globe over the past 20 years. A truly global citizen, she has lived and worked in five countries; South Africa, North America, Israel, the United Kingdom and India. She is currently Chief Learning Officer at the Aditya Birla Group. Prior to that she worked at Reliance Industries in the Retail Division, as Chief Culture Officer. Before coming to India she was Partner and Head of Thought Leadership at Whitehead Mann in London where she was operating as an executive coach, working with executive teams and conducting board effectiveness reviews. Previously she was global head of executive coaching for the Hay Group. A Chartered Psychologist, Susan has co-authored, How to Manage in a Flat World, Employability, and Complete Leadership (translated into Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Greek) and has produced a number of research publications.

Philip Whiteley, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, is an author and journalist, specializing in management, particularly the areas of leadership, motivation, and strategic people management. He has written numerous articles for The Times, Personnel Today and Coaching at Work among other titles, and has appeared on BBC Newsnight discussing the portrayal of the workplace in the media. He is author of People Express, Motivation, Unshrink the People and Complete Leadership and his books have been translated into six languages. Now based in the UK, Philip has previously worked in Latin America.

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice Article

Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 4 – Random, Unannounced Inspections

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice ArticleIt’s perfectly natural and expected that individuals want to do a good job and be recognized for it or at a minimum want to do a good enough job to avoid what are to them undesired consequences. Subsequently, people look to what their superiors communicate as required job performance to gag the level and timing of their efforts.


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Learn How to Achieve Enterprise Excellence at an Executive One-Day Seminar with Forrest Breyfogle

Competitive pressures are forcing executives to react faster to changing business conditions and customer requirements. Line managers and decision-makers need to have an efficient and effective system for day-to-day business operation with access to performance metrics that lead to the most appropriate activities.

In July 2008, we were privileged to host Forrest Breyfogle, Founder and CEO of Smarter Solutions and author of The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System series on the StrategyDriven Podcast. During our interview, Forrest shared his insights on using the Integrated Enterprise Excellence System (IEE) to improve business performance beyond that achievable through use of Lean Six Sigma or The Balanced Scorecard alone. IEE combines the best practices of earlier tools and methods, like Lean Six Sigma, with innovative analytical techniques to drive financial and operational success at the enterprise level and achieve the three Rs of business, everyone doing the Right things the Right way at the Right time.

And now Forrest is offering a one-day executive seminar where participants will learn how to implement The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System to:

  • increase productivity and eliminate daily firefighting and non-value add activities from business processes
  • sustain a consistent, high-performance team environment and culture
  • improve top- and bottom-line strategies and results in a fierce competitive and global market
  • improve the measurement criteria and report out of high-level business metrics
  • achieve and execute repeatable, strategic business plans

Seminar Details

This session is open to the public and complimentary for leading influencers and decision-makers. Please call (512) 918-0280 to determine if you qualify for this complimentary session.

Executive One-Day: Achieving Enterprise Excellence

Date:
June 11, 2009

Time:
8 am to 5 pm

Location:
Smarter Solutions, Inc.
11044 Research Blvd.
Suite B-400
Austin, Texas 78759

Contact:
(512) 918-0280

Pre-Registration:
http://www.smartersolutions.com/registrationform.htm

Additional Resource

Find out more about The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System by listening to StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 3 – An Interview with Forrest Breyfogle, author of Integrated Enterprise Excellence, Volume I – The Basics.

Additional Information

Forrest details how to implement The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System in his four book series which can be purchase by clicking on the following links:

Complimenting the outstanding insights contained within The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System series and our special edition StrategyDriven Podcast are the organizational performance improvement materials and resources found on his website, Smarter Solutions (www.SmarterSolutions.com).


Forrest W. Breyfogle III, author of The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System series, is CEO of Smarter Solutions, a global management coaching and consulting firm specializing in the design and application of innovative enterprise-wide performance measures and business solutions. For over 15 years, Forrest has advised company leaders and their teams on how to improve their organization’s performance through the use of his Integrated Enterprise Excellence System. In 2004, Forrest received the prestigious Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality for his earlier book, Implementing Six Sigma. He serves on the Board of Advisors for the University of Texas Center for Performance Excellence. To read Forrest’s full biography, click here.

The Advisor’s Corner – If I Don’t Measure, Can I Manage?

Question:

There are several axioms regarding measurement such as:

  • What gets measured gets done.
  • What gets measured and rewarded gets done well.
  • If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
  • What gets measured gets managed.

Is it really true that if something is not measured it is not being managed? Not everything can be measured simply because of resource constraints and I would hesitate to assert that these areas subsequently suffer from management neglect. What are your thoughts?

StrategyDriven Response:

The short answer is no. Not measuring something does not necessarily equate to its not being managed. An organization’s limited resources dictate that only a finite number of activities can be directly measured; just as a manager’s limited available time prevents all activities from being directly monitored. But while these cliches do not represent an absolute truth, managers do need to recognize current realities in terms of defined future goals in order to possess the knowledge necessary to formulate their organization’s activities. Performance measures represent one very effective means of acquiring this knowledge on a routine basis with relatively minimal cost.

Therefore, a key manager responsibility is to identify those few performance measures that will best enable him or her to guide their organization in the achievement of the company’s mission goals in the most efficient manner possible. These measures must necessarily monitor the conduct of ongoing production work and support identification and implementation of improvement opportunities. Because an organization’s circumstances and the market environment change over time, the adopted performance measures will likely be changed and/or replaced over time.

Final Thought…

Since having no performance measures is not an option, the real challenge becomes determining what to measure in order to effectively manages while at the same time remaining within the organization’s constrained resource budget. Several StrategyDriven articles, podcasts, and whitepapers are dedicated to the topic of identifying the right performance measures including:

Articles

Podcasts

Whitepapers

Lastly, it is important to recognize that the reverse is not necessarily true either; having performance measures does not necessarily result in a process or activity being managed or managed well. Performance measures are simply a management tool without which effective management is difficult.